Streamlining your Accounting Migration

This article will guide you through the process of migrating your accounting to Street, making it as smooth and seamless as possible.

If you are using Bridge for your core migration, please do not start adding any tenancy data to your Street account until we have migrated the main dataset into your account. This import of data from Bridge will include a lot of your tenancy information so you will only need to go through and check the data, correcting any errors and adding in anything that is missing, rather than adding the full tenancy data manually.

The first thing to do is to log into your account and head to Settings (left side panel at the bottom) > Account Administration > User Management. Here, click into each user that should have permission to manage accounting, scroll down to the Permissions section and tick the 'Allow this user to manage client accounting' and/or 'allow this user to manage bank accounts for Contractors and Owners' toggles:

Once all users have permissions to all the areas that they need access to, work through all the settings that you need ready for Street Accounting.

You will need to add your bank account details to your settings, along with the deposit schemes that you will be using via Settings > Company Settings > Accounting.

See here for more details: https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/7050146-accounting-settings

You will also need to setup your relevant invoice settings via Settings > Branch Settings > Invoice Settings.

All your tenancies will need to have been entered into Street before you can go live with accounting.

There are two ways of creating a tenancy in Street, directly from the property page or via a lettings application. For more information on these two options, see the 'creating a tenancy' help article. Creating a tenancy will automatically create the tenancy ledger.

In most instances when migrating, you will be adding your tenancies directly from the property page, rather than going through the full applicant process.

Note - If you go via this workflow, once complete, the property will show a status of LET.

If you need the property to show as LET AGREED on the portals you will need to follow the lettings application workflow that starts with a lettings offer, accepting the offer and progressing the lettings application.

If following the lettings application workflow, in the interest of saving time, there are certain parts of the process that you can skip should you choose. This is especially applicable to the Deposits section.

On the lettings application page, we advise you to skip the Deposit area as you will be able to add the deposit directly against the tenancy once this is created. The reason for this section is so that agents who are using Street, but not using Street accounting, have somewhere to note that the deposit has been received.

You can skip this Deposit area by clicking into and clicking the 'skip' button on each of the sections:

Once you've created the tenancy, you can head to the Deposits tab on the Tenancy page where you can Add Existing Deposit (if the deposit was setup on your previous CRM and you just need to record it) or Charge New Deposit (if you want to create a new deposit charge on the tenancy ledger which will require money to be receipted in to pay for it):

Now that you have set up your tenancies you will need to decide what day you are going to stop receipting monies into your current system and start receipting into Street.

The key to this is that the less money you have in your incumbent CRM, the fewer opening balances you are going to have to enter into Street, and the less work you will need to do.

Therefore you are best planning to do this the day after you have done a payment run for all your landlords, contractors, agency plus anyone else that you make outgoing payments to, reducing your existing balance to as little as possible.

Once you have set the date for transition, you can start to add in your recurring charges against your tenancy ledgers and your owner ledgers, such as rent payments and landlord insurance payments, plus any other recurring charges that you send out from your CRM.

Remember that you should only be setting up the charges to trigger after the date that you have set for your switchover. If you set up any charges to trigger before that date you may need to void them, (they will be sitting as a minus balance on the relevant tenant ledger).

For more details on ledgers in Street, please see the following help articles:
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Tenancy Ledger - https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/8155507-tenancy-ledger Owner Ledger - https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/8155171-owner-ledger

Agency Ledger - https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/7050150-agency-ledger

Contractor Ledger - https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/8155629-contractor-ledger

Lettings Application Ledger - https://intercom.help/streetcouk/en/articles/8171993-lettings-application-ledger

From the tenancy page that you are wanting to add the recurring charge onto, ( e.g. rent payments ) click on the accounting tab to show the tenancy ledger:

From the tenancy ledger click Add, and choose Recurring Charge:

Here you can choose who the recurring charge is payable to, and what the type of charge is e.g. choose the Owner for rent payments.

You choose the frequency of the recurring charge and the date that you would like the first charge to be added to the ledger - this should follow on from your charges in your current CRM.

The rent charge of £500.00 is per calendar month on the 15th of the month.

Today is the 10th of July, and you are looking to go live with accounting on the 11th Sept.

Therefore you would add the charge in Street to start on 15th Sept.

The charge for 15th Aug would be triggered in your current CRM and receipted into your current CRM, and paid out to the landlord, minus any fees.

Then the next charge is the one that you have set up for 15th Sept.

Your agency switches over on 11th Sept with an opening balance of zero on the tenancy ledger for that property. The next rent charge of £500 is then triggered in Street on 15th Sept. You receive this payment into Street along with all the following rent charges and payments.

HANDY HINT: If you go to the Tenancies page and look at the list, any tenancies where a recurring charge has not been set up will be marked with a red exclamation mark on the right hand side:

This is a great way to ensure that you have set up a charge on all your tenancies.

Where you have money on a contractor's ledger you might want to check that the relevant maintenance job is set up in Street with the invoice so that you can pay the money out to the contractor on your next payment run. Alternatively, you may just want to pay this out from your current CRM before going live with accounting.

At this stage, you can also go ahead and enter all the deposits that you hold/have registered for your tenants. These are entered from the tenancy page via the Deposits tab:

You can also see an overview of all your deposits if you click on the main Accounting tab in the left-hand column and then click on Deposits:

On the day before you want to switch from receipting into your old system and Street, we advise you to do all your receipting and make as many outgoing payments as possible to reduce as many of your opening balances to zero as possible. Now reconcile your bank accounts with your current/old system.

Following this you should not do any further receipting into your incumbent system. Or make any outgoing payments.

Now you will need to enter all your opening balances for your ledgers ( tenancy, owner, contractor, agency ). Remember those that have a negative opening balance ( in arrears ) will need charges added against them, to put them into a negative position.

Once you have added all your opening balances against the ledgers (Tenancy, Owner, Contractor and Agency), your overall balances in Street (client account, deposit account, should line up with your balances in your bank account. You are now in a position to stop receipting monies into your account and start using Street for your accounting.

Note: Bridge Migrations - Do not start adding core data until advised by your onboarding specialist.

Please read all the stages before starting to familiarise yourself with each step.

Step 1: Check Your Settings

Step 2: Add in Your Core Data / Manual Data Refinement ( Bridge Migration)

Step 3: Add Recurring Charges and Deposits - Only to be done when you know your go-live date

Remember that if you paid/process any deposits in your current software before going live on Street accounting you will need to mirror your actions in your Street account to ensure your overall balance is correct

Step 4: Adding Fees

Step 5: Finalising in your Old Software - The day before you go live on Street

Step 6: Adding in Your Opening Balances

You can now start using Street for your client accounting.